Verlander, Diaz, What Legacy are We Willing to Leave our Children? - Thoughts for the Day, September 28, 2026

Sep 28, 2026

My Verlander Moment

I remember it like it was yesterday.

It was June 12, 2007. I was umpiring a doubleheader in the Ann Arbor Recreation Department’s Wooden Bat League at Veterans Park on the west side of Ann Arbor.

I had worked the plate in the first game and was on the bases for the second.

Between innings, I was standing in the right-field grass, stopwatch running, waiting for the teams to take the field. My partner and I had agreed before the game that we were going to enforce the time limit between innings.

We were well past it.

Neither team had made a move.

Suddenly, my partner called me in for a conference.

He explained the problem.

Justin Verlander had a no-hitter going into the ninth inning against the Milwaukee Brewers. Apparently, everyone at Veterans Park was listening to the game on the radio, and neither team wanted to take the field until Verlander either completed the no-hitter or gave up a hit.

My partner wasn’t sure what to do.

I was.

I announced that our game was being delayed because of technical issues and would resume as soon as those technical issues were resolved.

For the next 15 minutes or so, players, umpires and spectators at Veterans Park listened as Verlander completed the first no-hitter of his career.

I then announced that the technical issues had been resolved, and our game resumed.

I had a smile on my face for the rest of the night.

Nineteen years later, I watched Verlander take a Major League mound for the final time.

It brought back a pretty good memory.

While We Said Goodbye to Verlander, Another Baseball Career Was Ending

Laz Díaz spent more than three decades behind Major League catchers. On Saturday, baseball quietly said goodbye to him too.

Like most Tigers fans watching Saturday’s game, much of my attention was focused on Justin Verlander.

And rightfully so.

We were watching the final start of a remarkable 21-year career. Verlander gave Detroit one last glimpse of the pitcher we’ve watched for so many years—5⅓ innings, six strikeouts and an emotional walk from the mound after his seven-year-old daughter Genevieve came running out to embrace him.

But I found myself watching someone else too.

The guy standing behind home plate: Laz Díaz.

Saturday was Verlander’s final start. Coincidentally, it was also Díaz’s final game behind the plate after a Major League umpiring career that began at Tiger Stadium in 1995.

As a former high-school umpire myself, I particularly enjoyed watching the respect the players, managers and coaches showed Díaz throughout the game.

A Different Kind of Baseball Career

Players become famous.

Umpires generally become famous only when something goes wrong.

For more than three decades, Díaz stood behind Major League catchers, worked alongside generations of players and managers and watched baseball change dramatically around him.

Think about the span of that career.

When Díaz made his Major League debut at Tiger Stadium in 1995, Sparky Anderson was managing the Tigers. Lou Whitaker, Kirk Gibson and Cecil Fielder were still playing.

Díaz went on to work three World Series and eventually became a crew chief.

Thirty-one years later, he returned to Detroit for his final weekend as a Major League umpire.

And standing 60 feet, six inches away on Saturday was Justin Verlander making his final start.

There’s another wonderful connection.

Díaz was the home-plate umpire for Verlander’s first postseason start in 2006.

Twenty years later, he was behind the plate for Verlander’s last regular-season start.

A Hollywood script couldn’t have made it much better.

Why I Always Enjoyed Watching Him

Díaz was one of my favorite umpires.

Not because he never missed a call.

Every umpire misses calls.

I liked him because he seemed to understand something important about umpiring:

The game wasn’t about him.

He respected the players.

He respected the game.

But he also seemed to enjoy himself.

That matters.

Baseball is a serious business at the Major League level, but ultimately it’s still a game.

Díaz never seemed to forget that.

Saturday provided a wonderful example.

Major League Baseball now uses the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System. If a player believes the umpire missed a pitch, he can challenge the call and let technology decide.

Díaz faced four challenges Saturday.

He went four-for-four.

Every one of his calls was upheld.

Each time the computer confirmed his call, Díaz seemed to enjoy it a little more.

There were smiles.

There was playful body language.

By the end, there was even a little celebratory dance.

Here was a man finishing more than three decades of calling balls and strikes having some fun with the computer that was checking his work.

I loved it.

And Apparently, the Players Did Too

What touched me most was watching the players.

As the game progressed, you could sense their affection and respect for Díaz.

There was joking.

There were smiles.

There was the kind of interaction that comes from people who have spent years together inside the foul lines of Major League Baseball.

At one point, Díaz even jokingly “checked” Verlander’s glove for a sticky substance, producing a laugh between two men finishing extraordinary careers on the same afternoon.

That moment probably said more about Díaz than any statistic could.

He could enforce the rules without forgetting the people playing the game.

Two Goodbyes

Saturday will understandably be remembered as Justin Verlander’s day.

Someday we’ll almost certainly watch Verlander take his place among baseball’s immortals in Cooperstown.

But from my perspective as someone who once put on the mask and chest protector—even if it was only at the high-school level—Saturday had another story worth remembering.

One great baseball career was ending on the mound.

Another was ending behind the plate.

Justin Verlander spent 21 years trying to fool hitters.

Laz Díaz spent more than three decades trying not to be fooled by pitchers.

And on his final afternoon behind the plate, when four players asked a computer to check his work, the computer essentially told him:

Laz, you got every one right.

Díaz smiled, celebrated a little and enjoyed the moment.

After all those years behind the plate, he’d earned it.

Not a bad way for an umpire to say goodbye.

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Question of the Day: What Kind of Inheritance Are We Leaving Our Grandchildren?

I’ve been thinking about inheritance lately.

Not because I’m planning on going anywhere soon, but at 75, I think about these things differently than I did at 45.

Most people I know from my generation have a simple goal.

If we’ve been fortunate enough to accumulate some savings, we’d like to leave something behind for our children and grandchildren.

Maybe it’s a house.

Maybe it’s an investment account.

Maybe it’s enough money to help with an education, a first home or simply make life a little easier.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to do that.

But even if we can’t leave our children a financial inheritance, I think most of us would agree on one thing:

We certainly don’t want to leave them our bills.

Imagine dying with a huge credit-card balance and telling your children:

Sorry. We enjoyed spending the money. Now you figure out how to pay for it.

Most of us would be horrified by the idea.

Which makes me wonder:

Why do we think so differently when the debt belongs to all of us?

Two Very Different Ideas About Responsibility

In our personal lives, many of us have spent decades trying to be financially responsible.

We paid our mortgages. We saved for retirement. We tried not to accumulate debt we couldn’t repay.

Eventually, many of us began thinking about what we might leave behind.

It’s my definition of a legacy:

Leave the people who follow you a little better off than you were.

Yet collectively, we’re doing something very different.

The federal government has accumulated roughly $40 trillion in gross debt.

More important than the exact number is its direction.

It’s still going up.

CBO projects annual federal deficits continuing to grow over the coming decade.

That’s not an inheritance I want to leave my children and grandchildren.

But I am.

Our Grandchildren Aren’t Getting a $40 Trillion Bill

There’s an important distinction.

The Treasury isn’t someday going to divide $40 trillion among Americans and send our children and grandchildren invoices.

The United States can refinance debt, collect taxes and issue Treasury securities. Borrowing can also be entirely appropriate during wars, recessions, pandemics and other national emergencies.

I’m not arguing that all government debt is bad.

I’m arguing something different.

Debt has a cost.

And the more debt we accumulate today, the more difficult choices future Americans may have to make because of decisions we made before they had any say in them.

The Real Inheritance May Be the Interest

CBO projects the federal government will spend about $1 trillion on net interest in 2026.

By 2036, it projects roughly $2.1 trillion a year.

Think about that.

That money isn’t educating a child.

It isn’t repairing a bridge.

It isn’t supporting Social Security.

It isn’t strengthening the military.

It isn’t curing cancer.

It’s the cost of financing previous borrowing.

That’s the inheritance problem.

Every dollar future taxpayers devote to interest is a dollar unavailable for something else—or a dollar that must be raised through additional taxes or borrowing.

The debt limits their choices.

And That’s Where the Contradiction Hits Me

I will feel pretty good if I’m able to leave my children and grandchildren some money.

At the same time, I’m part of a generation that has benefited from decades of federal spending while repeatedly electing governments that spent more than they collected.

We enjoyed the services.

We received the benefits.

We accepted the tax cuts.

And we borrowed part of the difference.

We’ve cut taxes without fully offsetting the lost revenue.

We’ve increased spending without fully paying for it.

We’ve fought wars and responded to recessions, a financial crisis and a pandemic.

There are plenty of explanations.

But explanations don’t make the debt disappear.

Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question

Political debates about debt usually begin with:

What should we cut?

Or:

Whose taxes should we raise?

Those questions immediately divide us.

Maybe we should begin somewhere else.

What do we owe the generations that come after us?

That’s the same question many of us ask when doing our estate planning.

Have I taken care of my responsibilities?

Have I avoided leaving unnecessary problems?

And, if I’ve been fortunate, have I left something behind that makes their lives a little better?

If those are reasonable questions around our kitchen tables, why aren’t they reasonable questions in Washington?

We Inherited Something Too

It’s also worth remembering that previous generations didn’t simply leave us debt.

They left us assets.

They built interstate highways, water systems and universities.

They funded scientific research.

They created Social Security and Medicare.

They built infrastructure and institutions we still rely upon.

Some of those investments were financed with debt.

So perhaps the goal shouldn’t be to leave our grandchildren no national debt.

That isn’t realistic, and it may not even be desirable.

Maybe the more important goal is this:

Leave them a country whose assets, opportunities and financial capacity are greater than what our parents left us—and stronger than the debt obligations we’re passing along.

Maybe that’s what a national legacy should look like.

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Quote of the Day

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

— Jackie Robinson

That seems appropriate today for two very different reasons.

A baseball umpire finishes a 31-year career with the respect of the people around him.

And the rest of us have to decide what kind of impact we’re going to leave on the generations that follow us.

Orchid of the Day

Today’s Orchid goes to Laz Díaz.

Thirty-one years in Major League Baseball.

Three World Series. Thousands of games. Millions of pitches. And through it all, he seemed to remember that while the calls mattered, so did the people.

Thanks for the memories, Laz.

Onion of the Day

Today’s Onion goes to our remarkable ability to worry about the inheritance we’re leaving our own children while paying far less attention to the financial inheritance we’re collectively leaving everyone’s children.

We’ll spend hours with financial advisers making sure our personal affairs are in order.

Maybe we should demand the same attention to the country’s balance sheet.

Question of the Day

If one of our responsibilities as parents and grandparents is to leave the next generation better off than we were, should that same responsibility influence the way we think about the national debt?

And if so, what are we personally willing to give up—or pay more for—to make that happen?